Pages

Friday, June 28, 2013

Friday Fears – Ancestry’s “New Search”

It’s been an interesting few days on the APG mailing
list.Ancestry has announced that it
will end access to its “old search”.This means that all users will have to use “new search”.

Before I go any further, for those who don’t follow
Ancestry, “new search” has been in place for years, so it’s not really all that
new.

What’s been interesting is watching the outrage from professionals
on the APG mailing list.Many of those
folks, it seems, have been using the “old search” as it gives them better
results than the “new search.”For the
record, I’ve been using the new search for so long that I had forgotten that
there was a different way to search.This may be why I’m having so much trouble understanding the annoyance
these professionals have been showing due to Ancestry’s business decision.

What Ancestry has done really isn’t any different than what
any software company does.They come up
with a new product, and end support for the old version.Microsoft does this with operating systems
every few years.Like Microsoft,
Ancestry supported the old system for a number of years, but now, likely for
business reasons that users are not privy too, must end support for that
system.As a developer myself, I can
tell you first hand that it’s no fun trying to support different systems,
especially when you know that one is unprofitable or, as Ancestry has stated in
regards to “old search”, little used.

To a point, I understand the user’s frustration.No one likes changing their habits.However, my personal opinion is that Ancestry
gave folks plenty of time to learn the new system before retiring the old.The most common complaint that I’m seeing is
that the new search returns too many results.Understandable, but these complaints are coming from folks who routinely
browse old records on microfiche, often with no help from any sort of search
engine.They should be used to sifting
through large amounts of data.

A few weeks ago, on the Transitional Genealogist’s mailing
list, there was a discussion about computer algorithms and how they could be
used in the future to sift through large amounts of genealogical data.The general opinion that I saw with that
discussion basically boiled down to “a computer could never do what I do.It will miss results.”Ancestry’s new search sort of swings the
pendulum in the opposite direction.It
doesn’t miss results, because it’s willing to show unrelated results (and often
does).It leaves it up to the user to
filter the obvious misses out.

Okay.So one group
says that computers can’t refine data as well as a human.Another group says that they want the
computer to refine the data they look at.Which group is right?

Both, I’d say.This,
I believe, is one of those impossible tasks of trying to please everyone.There’s probably a middle ground, but
Ancestry hasn’t found it yet.Keep in
mind that Ancestry is also a business.Their product is crafted for a wide audience.Maybe they are missing their target
demographic, or maybe they know exactly what they are doing based on their own
business analysis of years’ worth of “old search”/”new search” data.Either way, Ancestry changed their
method.It works for some, but not
others.The others will either adapt, or
leave Ancestry.It’s a natural process.Users can fear it (it is change after all),
or try to embrace it.My hope is that
genealogists will adapt.That is,
hopefully, what we do.If we didn’t, we’d
always be looking for the same information in the same places, never learning
anything new.

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

As a sixth-generation Vermonter living in the same area as my ancestors, I have a great interest in family and local history. This interest has led me further and further into the field of genealogy, which I have pursued as a hobby for the last twenty-five to thirty years. In the past few years I have begun learning more disciplined approaches to the field, and have started revisiting the ancestors that I gathered during my name-collecting days.